Tuesday, September 6, 2011

On one of my favorite podcasts, the Sklar Brothers' Sklarbro Country from the incredibly prolific Earwolf comedy podcast production company, the sports-loving twin brothers poke fun at the batty behavior of sports celebrities and their often equally deranged fans with the same biting and wonderfully rapid-fire delivery they brought to their much-missed ESPN Classic sports clip show Cheap Seats. Randy and Jason Sklar are also huge boosters of indie bands like The Morning Benders and The Henry Clay People, so the beds and mid-show musical interludes in between the Sklarbitrations, Quick Hits, visits from Racist Vin Scully and Sklarson impressions (a.k.a. the Sklars' Johnny Carson impressions) are often indie rock tracks. An occasional hip-hop joint gets thrown into the mix because fortunately, the brothers' musical tastes aren't limited to the "flaccid, smarmy, girl-pant, bearded, fixie bike rock" that one Sklarbro Country fan amusingly complained about in the Earwolf site's comments section (he's right about the stupidity of guys wearing girl pants though).

You know how TV shows like The Sopranos, Grey's Anatomy and more recently, Breaking Bad have replaced terrestrial radio and MTV as a place to discover sounds by new artists whenever the shows utilize existing songs as either source music or "needle drops" for montages or action sequences (which led to several newspaper and music magazine articles declaring that "scripted TV is the new radio")? The beds and musical interludes on comedy podcasts are turning into another great place to unearth new sounds. Sklarbro Country was where I was first exposed to terrific tunes like The Morning Benders' "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)" and Those Darlins' "Screws Get Loose."

When an ill track I've never heard before like Ana Tijoux's "1977" gets airplay on a series like Breaking Bad, I have to play detective and hunt for it online (that is if Alan Sepinwall doesn't ID the track on his blog, but he usually does so). Fortunately, the Sklar Brothers ID each tune for the listeners (and the guest comedians who are sometimes curious about a tune's title) as it's being played by their sound engineer, so I don't have to play detective, although I wish the brothers posted the track titles on the Earwolf site. Many Sklarbro Country listeners like myself have wondered where they could find playlist information. A few days ago, I discovered the Sklars have been posting playlist info, but on their WhoSay site (and in Twitpic form instead of as text for some bi-Sklar reason).

About me

I run a Tumblr called Accidental Star Trek Cosplay, and my writing has appeared on Word Is Bond (byline: DJ AFOS) and Splitsider. In 2007, I came up with the premise for "Sampler," a short story in 2009's Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (no relation to Image's Secret Identities).

This monthly blog began as a tie-in to AFOS (A Fistful of Soundtracks), an Internet radio station I ran from 2002 to 2016 (I archived some station content over at Mixcloud). The blog evolved from being a blog about both score music and radio to being a space where I discuss films, TV or any kind of music, without ever doing any stupid listicles, because this blog has been, since 2015, a listicle-free zone. People, stop writing like you're auditioning for BuzzFeed.

AFOS also stands for All Frequencies Open, Sir! and Asians Fucking Owning Shit.